Apple Offers 'Second Chance' WWDC Tickets to Developers

If you lost the great, big lottery for tickets to this year's Worldwide Developers Conference — the Apple extravaganza to be held in June at San Francisco's Moscone Center — don't despair just yet. According to numerous reports, Apple is sending out emails and hopping on the phone to chat with developers, asking them if they'd like to purchase any unclaimed tickets to WWDC that the company happens to scrounge up.

The kicker: There's no indication as to how Apple might be selecting these "second-chance" developers for its to-be-determined batch of tickets. Is it a random draw? A hand-picked group of exclusive folk who missed out on the chance to score tickets the first time?

Regardless, here's how Apple (likely) managed to find more tickets. When the first invitations for WWDC passes went out on April 7, the company indicated that those who initially won the big lottery had exactly one week to purchase their tickets. While Apple didn't indicate what might happen to those who didn't take advantage of their lottery win by 8 p.m. ET on April 14, one doesn't need to connect the dots too far to figure out that Apple likely rescinded said invitation.

As such, Apple now has an undisclosed number of new WWDC invites to offer up… and a much shorter timeline for doing so. Developers who receive an email about purchasing one of the new WWDC tickets made available have exactly 24 hours from receipt the email to make the buy. If they don't, we can only assume that Apple's going to offer up their ticket to the next person in line, and so on and so forth.

This year is the first that Apple opted to use a lottery system for WWDC passes — which, to us, seems a lot better than the "land grab" approach from previous years, where the first-come, first-served registration system would frequently lead to the event selling out quite quickly. Last year's WWDC, for example, ran out of tickets in approximately two minutes or so.

As for what one might expect from this year's five-day conference, it's rumored that Apple will be showing off its new iteration of OS X — version 10.10 — in addition to some snippets of iOS 8. That's in addition to the usual WWDC fare: hundreds of technical and design-focused sessions presented by Apple engineers, technology and design labs, speakers, "get together" events, as well as a friendly "Stump the Experts" trivia game (to name a few).